Work Text:
Myka reflected that other fathers might have fainted with joy to have a daughter who had just graduated from college with an engineering degree, who wanted to continue on to graduate school.
But other fathers were not Warren Bering, the most celebrated ballet costumer of his era. “If you want my help,” he told Myka, “you’ll come home and work this production, plus the tour. If you put in the work, and if you haven’t changed your mind by the end of the summer, I’ll help you pay for that engineer thing.”
Myka didn’t want her father’s help, but she needed it. So she agreed.
It was Giselle, and her father had outdone himself. Again and as usual. His costumes were hailed as masterpieces: innovative yet classical; mystifying in their movement; spectacular, in particular, in the way they framed yet somehow softened the repeated arabesque à la hauteur so essential to the work.
Myka did appreciate that her father trusted her with his creations: she was to dress the production’s Giselle, Helena Wells, to whom Myka had introduced herself only as “Myka.”
“I haven’t seen you before. With the company. Are you a summer intern?” Helena Wells asked. She was new to the company just that year. She had not watched Myka and her sister (now up-and-coming set designer) Tracy grow up, not as so many chorus dancers, set dressers, tech and house staff had done.
Myka wanted to laugh—as if her father would let an intern touch the costumes for his Giselle—but she said yes instead. Not her father’s daughter; just an intern. Nothing and nobody. It was, in its way, a relief.
Early in the run, on a quiet morning, Myka went to the theater by herself. She wanted to put herself in the familiar space, to determine if what her father continued to maintain, that she truly had been raised for the theater, was correct. That coming here was in fact coming home, and that home was where she belonged.
Immediately, it did not feel like home, because she was not alone: Helena Wells was onstage, rehearsing. But that was not the right word: no, she was almost flying through the choreography, her body turning and floating in ways that Myka had quite frankly thought beyond her capacity as a dancer. Her Giselle was well danced, of course, but it was not magic. The production outshone her—but Myka thought that if she danced like this, no production could possibly shine so bright.
She must have sighed aloud as she watched. Helena came to rest, looked out into the seats, and said, “Who’s there?”
She should have tried to escape. Instead, she said, “It’s Myka. Your dresser.”
“Myka,” Helena said. “This is divine providence, it must be.”
“It is?”
“I’m having… well, it’s the costumes. Some of them. The movement in them, I mean. I can’t quite… for example.” She moved into arabesque, and Myka was stunned again. If Helena could move this way out of costume but not in, her father had committed a horrible crime against dance. And nature. And the world.
“You should bring it up with—” and she almost said “my father,” but she managed to hold back. “Mr. Bering. You should bring it up with him.”
Helena shuddered. “I can’t imagine that that would go well. I’m just starting out; I’m nobody. Lucky to be dancing this part. I can’t tell Warren Bering that there’s something wrong with his costumes.”
Myka had not gotten up that morning intending to undermine her father. She had not. But she said, “Okay. Let’s get you laced in and see if we can figure out what’s wrong ourselves.”
“Divine providence,” Helena declared again.
Myka watched Helena move in the costume they decided to try and, in comparison to earlier, she thought she could see something: a tightness in Helena’s torso, maybe? She was missing something, she was sure.
She thought it more likely that the costume itself could tell her, so she knelt in front of Helena, lifted her hands to Helena’s waist. “Once up to penché?” she requested, and Helena obliged by bending forward and raising her left leg behind her, high, higher, but not quite high enough. Myka felt immediately the problem: Helena’s hips couldn’t open fully due to the placement of the stays. She almost rolled her eyes. It was the simplest of fixes, and why her father hadn’t immediately seen it… but he cared more for the look than for the dance; he always had.
She looked up at Helena, whose leg was elevated, still. She was not shaking at all; her expression was concentrated, however, and her face was very close to Myka’s. The barest glisten of exertion shone at her brow. Her hair was loose, as it never would have been in performance, and Myka now considered that constriction a crime, too. Myka’s palms began to sweat against the costume.
She coughed and began to let go, and Helena lowered her leg. She smiled. “You’re very like my first ballet instructor. We had to hold poses for hours on end, it seemed. Are you so demanding about everything?”
She was teasing. Probably. But Myka suddenly did not know what to say to her, other than, “I’ll fix this one today. We’ll see tonight how it works out, okay?”
****
It worked out very well. As Myka unlaced her from it, late that night, Helena said. “And the others? Can we meet tomorrow?”
Myka should have told her no. She should have said, “I’ll tell my father; he’ll fix everything.” That would have brought an end to it all, and particularly to the annoying shake her hands had taken on, since this morning, when she had to bring them near Helena’s body. Instead, she nodded.
They met the next morning. And the next. And the next. Helena asked, “How do you know what to do?” and Myka told her, “I’m interested in… engineering. Structure. Materials. I’m going to graduate school in the fall.”
“All right, engineer,” Helena said. “How would you costume me?”
“How would I… for what?”
“For anything. Not just altering Warren Bering’s costumes so I can move. How would you costume me so I can move? What is the structure, what are the materials?”
Myka had never considered costuming in precisely this way, but it was… it was an engineering problem. A physics problem. “I need to think about it,” she said.
Myka did not notice, or did not allow herself to notice, that Helena smiled at that in a way she had not smiled at Myka before. Helena said, “All right. You think about it. And we’ll meet again tomorrow.”
****
An engineering problem. A physics problem. Myka tried to consider forces and movements and rotations… “It’s ultimately a matter of fluid dynamics,” she said to Helena.
“Wouldn’t it be aerodynamics?” Helena asked.
“It’s a subset,” Myka said absently. “Air’s a fluid.”
Helena ran through positions, steps, combinations, leaps. Myka watched and thought about flow and viscosity and turbulence. Helena was a body in motion; she didn’t even have to be a living, breathing body, just a figure with dimensions, a structure that propelled itself through space—no, through fluid.
But although Myka had always been praised by professors for her insight into problems involving motion, she found that she did not really understand what was happening before her. What forces were being applied. She took notes; she asked Helena, “So you push off from the leg and then rotate?”
Helena sighed with frustration and replied, “The rotation starts in the back, before the push.”
When Myka was small, she would stand in her father’s workroom and run her hands through the hangings of fabric that he called his “touch library.” He explained to her that he had to understand the feel of any new material before he could tell how it would move through space, how it would drape, fall, float. “I know that if it feels like this tulle, it will hover like smoke,” he told her. “But if it’s more like this taffeta? It might just move fast enough to beat the dancer through a pirouette.”
“Come here,” Helena ordered from the middle of the stage.
“Why?”
“So you’ll understand,” Helena said. “Come here, and put your hand on my back.”
Myka did as she was told.
“And now the other on my thigh.”
Myka did that too.
Helena performed the motion again—and Myka understood.
****
Helena’s body became Myka’s touch library. And Myka began to work through questions of where muscles would need to be compressed in order to facilitate a stronger, higher leap; where support would need to be provided in order to allow for a deeper bend, a sharper turn. She knew she didn’t know enough yet about materials to determine what fabrics would yield the right combinations of freedom and friction in the air; dancers had to move in so many different ways, and the variables multiplied in truly mind-boggling fashion. But Myka was methodical. Myka thought she knew what she was doing. She began to stitch a leotard, a full-body leotard of her own design. She bought and dismantled athletic gear to find the right panels and thicknesses and supporting architecture. She found that she knew more about certain aspects of garments, and their construction, than she had realized. She found that about other aspects, she knew next to nothing.
Myka also found, as the weeks went on, that the more time her hands spent on Helena’s body, the more time her hands wanted to spend on Helena’s body.
She realized what that meant far too late, in an astonishingly embarrassing flash, as Helena was executing a series of pas de chat and Myka was following behind, one hand against the small of her back, feeling the flexes as Helena moved up, down, forward. Myka felt a rush of heat, her hand spasmed, and Helena fell forward, onto her knees. “What was that for?” she complained from the floor. “They weren’t perfect, but that was quite harsh!”
“I’m sorry,” Myka said. Her hands were burning, her heart was running sprints, and she had a wild hope that she could be saved only if this happened to be one of those old-fashioned theaters with a trapdoor in the stage… “I was… distracted.”
Helena bent her legs under her and reached for the hand that she expected to help her up, the one Myka hadn’t extended. “Well?” she asked, and Myka could not help but give her that hand. And as she pulled Helena up, it was all she could do to keep from pulling her closer and closer. Now that she knew. But did Helena know? Had Helena known all along?
Her answer came, she thought, when Helena, still standing very close, said, “I’m a bit distracted this morning too. Do you know, that woman who runs the donor program here had the nerve to proposition me after the performance last night? I can’t imagine what she could have been thinking, when I feel like it’s written all over me that… well, that my interests lie elsewhere.”
At those words, Myka decided she would back away and look anywhere but at Helena, because okay. Okay. Helena did not know, or she would obviously not be here with Myka, letting Myka put her hands all over her like this. And now, at least, Myka knew that Helena should never know. Myka thanked god in his heaven that she would have to dress Helena only twice more: tonight, and then the final performance of the tour.
She dragged herself through those two torturous sessions with Helena’s body, avoiding her skin as if it were made of knives. “What’s the matter?” Helena asked, but Myka just shook her head.
She pleaded graduate-school paperwork when Helena wanted to know why they couldn’t meet in the mornings. Helena pouted, “But you haven’t costumed me yet!”
“Soon,” Myka said.
She made sure that when the company returned home, there was a box in Helena’s dressing room. The box contained a full-body leotard, which Myka worried was more than a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of a garment, but… she had promised. The box also contained a notecard, on which Myka had written only “thank you.” She didn’t trust herself to try to say anything more.
When Myka left, her father praised her, saying that she had worked hard enough to earn “that engineer thing.”
****
Three months later, her father told her that Helena Wells had left the company—her Giselle, particularly later in the run, had been impressive enough to garner attention from several quarters. “Just as well,” her father concluded. “Difficult body.”
Myka had a little distance now, just enough of a sliver that she almost let herself say, “You have no idea.”
****
When Myka had the opportunity in graduate school to undertake a major project of her own design, it might have been by pure chance that she concentrated on the development of materials and innovative ways to wrap them around, to attach them to, the human body. It might have been chance as well that her success with that project led her into creating suits for swimmers, runners, skiers, gymnasts, any athletes who needed to push themselves in predefined ways through wind and water. Every problem was different, and every body was different as well: height, musculature, fast twitches, slow. Men and their astonishing leaps, their upper bodies leading their flight; women so much more subject to gravity, yet able to flow so beautifully through less rarefied air. And Myka did find that she preferred the latter, that her hands no longer burned and shook in response to such things.
When she was offered the chance to design a line of athletic apparel, she surprised everyone but herself and her father by rushing, headlong but with accomplishment, into the creation of specialized dance practice gear.
The apparel company that employed her put her last name on the gear; “Bering” meant something in the dance world, and the marketers believed that most would think it was her father’s line. He was amenable to the idea, but only in terms of what he thought it implied about Myka’s future: “The stage beckons, Myka, just like I always told you it would. I won’t be around forever, and those dancers won’t costume themselves,” he told her. “You’re only a few steps away now.”
“I won’t be taking those steps,” she said back. But she said it with less resentment—and, if she were being honest, less certainty—than she ever would have before.
****
The apparel company wanted to make an ad to run before ballet and other dance videos on various websites. They would show dancers in the gear and feature talking-head testimonials from dance-world stars. They gave Myka a list. The biggest name on it, by far, was… of course. Helena Wells. “Her agent called us,” said the marketing manager.
“Can I watch?” Myka asked. She felt—and felt that she sounded—far too eager. “When they make the video?”
“I don’t see why not. It’ll probably be boring, though.”
“I don’t think so,” Myka told him.
She tried to tell herself that she just wanted to see Helena move in the clothing, just a few steps, and then she would be satisfied.
****
The shoot, such as it was, took place in a theater, and Myka was careful to slip in quietly, after the first day had already begun. Eight dancers were warming up onstage. Myka took a certain amount of pride in the way they moved, the way the gear helped shape their bodies.
She took the most pride in the central figure, the body to whom the others quite obviously deferred. She knew how that central figure flew and floated, knew that body’s fluidity and flow. Myka’s touch library had expanded enormously, of course, but her hands had learned most of what they knew about power and force and motion from that body.
Myka could have watched her forever. Instead she consoled herself with the idea that she had, in the end, done what she had promised Helena she would do.
She got a call that night at her hotel: the director wanted to talk to her before the next morning’s shoot, so she should come to the theater. Very early. Her protest that she hadn’t really intended to go back was not received well, so she sighed and agreed.
****
She knew she’d been set up the minute she saw the stage.
Helena Wells stood there, alone, tapping a pointe-shod foot. “You’re a little late,” she said.
Myka had checked the time on her phone right before she walked in. “I don’t think so.”
“We’ll see,” Helena told her. “Come on, get up here.”
Myka climbed the stairs to the stage. She would not have been surprised if her hands had begun to shake; the nostalgia was that strong. She tried to think now, as she had tried to then, about physics and engineering, but her brain began to throw random terminology at her, random terminology the likes of which she had somehow never considered in other contexts: slender-body theory, viscous flow, lubrication theory, surface tension…
“The very minute I saw these Bering leotards, I knew it was you,” Helena said.
“How?”
“I still have the prototype.”
Myka smiled. “Did it fit at all? Did it work at all?”
“It fit perfectly. I can’t say that it worked perfectly. I tried a grand jeté and it twisted very strangely. I thought I’d pulled a hamstring.”
“Oh god,” Myka groaned. “I gave you an ugly leotard that tried to kill you.”
“It didn’t try to kill me. Besides, as I said, it was the prototype. Because look.” Helena launched, seemingly with no effort at all, into that jeté. It was perfect. When she landed, she said, “It led to this. How can I begrudge you a twinge in my hamstring?”
She leapt again, a delicate little assemblé, and landed directly in front of Myka, who couldn’t help herself. “You move beautifully. Even more so than before.”
“Thanks to you.”
Myka shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“I thank you every day. I wear you every day.”
“Stop.”
“I won’t. You’ve already changed practice for good. Once you start designing for the stage? Performance is going to change too.”
“I’m not going to design for the stage.”
Helena laughed, and Myka felt her breath move the air. “I cannot imagine you’ll leave that to your father.”
“How did you find out? When did you find out?”
“You’ll be surprised, but it didn’t even occur to me until I saw these leotards. But then, a little Internet searching, and it all became clear. That’s how you knew so much about the Giselle costumes, wasn’t it?”
“Mostly,” Myka said.
“Well, let’s see if you remember what they felt like. Penché now, as in that first one. You’ll have to hold me,” she commanded.
“You don’t need my help.” But Myka knelt as she was told, down on one knee, knelt and held a waist that felt exactly the same, felt her hips open exactly as they should. Helena leaned forward, and her face was inches from Myka’s, and she held, and held, and held.
Helena held, and held, and held, until finally she said, “Taskmistress,” and dropped her leg. And Myka had to admit, to herself and to them both, that she had been waiting. It was magical, the waiting, to feel the tension build in the waist, in the hips, to see the sweat, to feel Helena begin to shake, to know that she was fighting against the drop, to feel her, in the end, lose the fight.
“How did that feel?” Helena asked. She was still standing over Myka.
“Perfect,” Myka said.
And then Helena left her feet on the ground, but she dropped her upper body, bent forward as if in reverence. She paused an inch away, then, bending further, placed her lips onto Myka’s.
Myka thought that she was imagining it, that she had slipped into some longing-fueled reverie that she would immediately snap out of… but she didn’t snap out of it. Helena’s lips began to move, and Myka’s did too, and her hands traveled, over the leotard, up and down Helena’s hips, around to the small of her back, as far as she could reach from her position on the floor.
When Helena broke the kiss and levered herself back up, Myka could practically trace the tension in her obliques as they contracted.
“And how did that feel?” Helena asked. “I was tempted to do it in penché, just for effect, but I feared I’d collapse and kick you.”
“How did it feel?” Myka wanted to stand up, but she was having enough trouble moving her mouth to form words. “Where did this come from? What changed?”
“What changed? Nothing’s changed! Did I not just make that very clear?” Helena was looking very like the prima ballerina she was, and as if Myka were in fact a know-nothing intern, one who looked stupid enough to lace her incorrectly.
“But we never… I didn’t even… and then you said your interests lay elsewhere! That it was written all over you!” Helena’s exact words from that day—they had not left Myka’s head in the years since she’d said them. Myka had reminded herself of them every time she’d been foolish enough to imagine that something like this could have been possible.
“Because it was! The entire company knew I was in love with you.”
“What?” It was as if she’d stepped into an alternate reality, one in which dreams came true. Or turned out to have been true all along. Or something equally incomprehensible.
“I spent that entire summer dying of love for you. I was crazy with love, and your hands were on me all the time. All the time, and yet you never seemed interested in me, never seemed to want to touch me beyond determining how I managed to propel myself through air. Pardon me, through the fluid that we lesser beings call air.” She pushed Myka’s hands from where they still rested on her back, grabbed her arms, and pulled her up. “That day, with the pas de chat. I thought you realized, that you finally might say that you wanted me too… but then you never said anything to me, ever again, and I thought it meant that you saw and hated it. Hated me for it.”
“But if you thought that then, what changed? Why would you now?”
“Well, as I said, some Internet searching. You may be surprised to learn that your recently turned ex-girlfriend still has pictures of the two of you all over her social media. Quite easily findable if one is looking for Myka Bering.” Helena blinked at Myka. “She is your ex-girlfriend, correct? Something about it wasn’t her, it was you? You should know, incidentally, that any girlfriends I may have had are ex as well.”
Myka just stared.
“Close your mouth,” Helena said. She tilted her head, seemed to reconsider. “Actually, no, don’t close your mouth.” Helena kissed her again, and this time Myka wasn’t surprised, didn’t fear that she was imagining it, and couldn’t keep herself from crushing that perfect body to her, feeling under the leotard those familiar back muscles, the power in Helena’s shoulders, moving up past the leotard to the cords of her neck. Her fingers slid back down, pulling at the neck of the leotard, trying to find more skin; she whimpered slightly when there was absolutely no give.
Helena pulled back just enough to give a breathless chuckle. “Frustrating, isn’t it, engineer. So fine to dance in, so difficult to… maneuver. Incidentally, I have a dressing room here. And you are about to find out precisely how difficult it is to remove a person from one of your technologically advanced leotards.” She pulled away, caught Myka’s hand. “If you want to, that is.”
If she wanted to? She could not imagine wanting anything more than this alternate reality in which her dreams were coming true. If she wanted them to. “Just tell me this is really happening,” Myka said. “All of it. That you’re standing there in something I made, telling me I can take it off you, that you’re standing there at all, that you… that it’s really you.”
Helena came back to her, kissed her again, this time on the cheek. “It’s really me. It’s always been me. I told you: you’re just a little late.”
****
The dressing room, blessedly, contained a sofa, and it was comfortable and soft at first, and then it didn’t matter at all whether it was comfortable or soft, and the leotard was in the way, and then it was no longer in the way, and Myka thought that perhaps she had died on the way to the theater that morning and unexpectedly stumbled into heaven.
She’d thought she’d known Helena’s body so well. She knew now that she had a great deal to learn, and that she wanted to spend a great deal of time learning it. “You have to finish shooting that video today,” she said quietly, as Helena lay against her. “But what about tonight?”
Helena laughed. Myka felt the air move again. “I have a performance tonight. I’d say you should dress me, but I don’t think I’d be able to dance if you did.”
Myka kissed her eyebrow. “I don’t think I’d be able to bring myself to put you into costume, so we’re even.”
“Are we? I did ambush you. I’m sorry for that.”
Myka smiled. “No, you’re not. It was dramatic, so you’re not sorry at all. You’re the one who wanted our first kiss to be in penché. Such a prima.” She ran her hand up Helena’s now-naked back. “You know what? It wasn’t that difficult to get you out of the leotard.”
Helena shook her head. “Such an engineer.”
****
In the end, after some time and much urging and persuasion, Helena was proved right: costumes made by Warren Bering’s daughter did change the nature of performance. The only thing Helena was wrong about was a pronouncement, early in the persuasive process, that the name Bering would gain even greater fame in the dance world because of that daughter than for her father. It didn’t.
But the name Bering-Wells did.
END